Many individuals and employers utilize mobile devices, such as personal digital assistants, smart phones, tablets, laptops, etc., to conduct business and personal related endeavors. Today's business obligations routinely require individuals to travel, attend various meetings, and perform tasks that frequently require individuals to be out of offices and away from their computers and other devices. It is becoming increasingly important for working individuals to have a means of connecting to various enterprise resources (e.g., corporate email, Share Point sites, work documents, etc.), regardless of the person's location. Corporations want to maximize productivity while enabling workers to leave the office during business hours and maintain their necessary responsibilities. Accordingly, many companies implement solutions (e.g., providing corporate user devices to their employees, utilizing mobile device management (MDM) applications, and incorporating Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs, etc.) that enable employee access to corporate content on mobile user devices. Further, the proliferation of mobile devices in every aspect of life, including home and personal use, is ever present.
Companies that allow workers to access corporate networks and resources need to ensure such access is secure and sensitive material is protected from external intrusion. Providing corporate mobile devices with secure access to enterprise servers creates an efficient means of monitoring and regulating security, but this option is typically more costly for the employer with regards to wireless plans and employing sufficient IT personnel to monitor devices and server access attained by user devices. Thus, device management becomes a priority, responsibility, and obligation for the corporation. For example, if a problem occurs with a device, either hardware or software related, it is the duty of the employer to rectify the employee's need, thereby creating additional responsibilities for IT administrators and possibly a need for more IT personnel.
BYOD programs allow employees to utilize personal mobile user devices to access enterprise resources. As BYOD programs gain momentum and popularity amongst employers and employees, the concern and desire to ensure enterprise resources and personal content are kept separate grows as well. Generally, an organization's primary concerns relate to worker productivity, specific duties, and availability, while maintaining a secure and manageable user device environment. Employees appreciate the availability and convenience associated with wirelessly accessing enterprise resources and content, but desire assurance that the privacy of their personal content is upheld, even with corporate applications installed on their personal user devices.
Further, many households share personal user devices between some or all of the members of a household. Different users within the household may want personalized settings and attributes applied to the device while that particular individual utilizes the personal user device. Generally, with regards to most personal user devices, the active settings, characterizations, and attributes remain active on the personal user device until a user modifies them. Furthermore, there does not exist a mechanism to separate and containerize multiple individual internal compartments to serve as a unique repository, each exclusively assigned to one user. Therefore, in the scenario concerning multiple members of a family utilizing the same device, each time a new user engages the device, said user will be required to change the settings to their preferred configuration. Often, such actions are highly undesirable and time consuming, and leave individual users dissatisfied with the operation or configuration of the shared personal user device.
Due to the aforementioned concerns, many users retain multiple devices to maintain a separation of entities. This approach provides a complete separation of personal and enterprise matters, ensuring a company cannot access personal content. The multiple device methodology also presents a clear visual and physical indication of separation. Additionally, many families own multiple identical user devices offering the various members of the household a unique user experience. While this presents a clear separation of entities and promotes individualism, this also proves to be more costly for the family. Other conventional approaches address this problem by utilizing a containerized application on personal user devices, wherein the enterprise or alternate environment is only accessible via user initiation of the application. This approach does not offer the user an autonomous notification of incoming data in the alternate environment, nor does it present an obvious physical and visual distinction of separation.
Therefore, there is a long-felt but unresolved need to create and implement a plurality of separate entities or personas on an individual user device to preserve individualized attributes and present a clear distinction between the multiple entities. Likewise, multiple separate entities may be implemented on one individual user device ensuring enterprise data is separately, yet securely managed and preserving user's personal privacy.